Forum Post: thinking about "democracy 2.0"

How can it be that so many people don't feel represented by the lawmakers, although we are said to live in a democracy?

I think Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives a hint in his "social contract". More then 200 years ago he wrote that a representative democracy isn't a real one. His proposed workaround was to keep states small enough (city-states) to make direct democracy possible like in ancient Rome. For very large states he proposed a "benevolent monarch".

Having that in mind, we could say that a representative democracy is a workaround for states too big for direct democracy since the problem with the monarch is that he may or may not be benevolent. But what is "too big"? Back then, too big was when it was not realistic for the people to gather in one place in order to discuss a topic and finally vote on it.

We have 2011. We can talk with most other people in the world in (perceived) real time. We can lookup almost any kind of information on the Internet in no time. We have "high frequency trading". We can buy something by just making some mouse clicks, ...

I think it's time to get democracy modernized! With our existing information technology, it's nomore necessary to physically gather in one place in order to discuss something. In fact we are already discussing. The problem is that decisions are still taken by the representatives. I know that it's very difficult to change a system after it exists for such a long time - it's already difficult to find out it needs to be changed. Normally you wouldn't change a working system. The question is: does it (still) work? I don't think so, and in my understanding that's what this movement is about. For the protesters in Tahrir square it was more obvious what to demand. We can't demand something which already exists elsewhere, but need to define it ourselves. This needs outside the box thinking.

What I have in mind are not just direct votes on some proposed text, as it is for example popular in Switzerland. My proposal is to move the whole legislative process into the hands of the people, making the representatives obsolete. Many of you will spontaneously think: ordinary people don't have the required knowledge and background to make decent decisions on complicated topics. To those I reply: How many of your representatives do you think really read (and understand) such complicated laws? In the end it will always be experts writing the laws, and decisions will be based on networks of trust (be it personal relations, party affiliation or whatever). Why shouldn't it be possible to establish such a process without the intermediate layer of representatives? Wouldn't such a change in the system automatically fulfill most of the other, more abstract requests (e.g. less corporate power)?

How can we get there? We need to bring together our knowledge. History, political science, social science, computer science, etc. We need it all. Only when bringing all this expertise together, we can develop a working model of "democracy 2.0". I know there already exist several projects pointing into this direction (e.g. the system "liquid democracy" used by the Pirate Party in Germany), but this is still taking place "inside the box".

There's no doubt that it will be a long way until the establishing of such a systemic change in the constitutions of our states. I don't know what this way could look like as by sure it can't be an easy task to convince political parties about it. Maybe it's not possible for the United States to move first. But there are other, smaller countries, where it's not unusual for new political parties to come up and sometimes also grow big.

Anyway, I'm sure we a long time of economic troubles in front of us, thus we shouldn't expect for things to settle automatically, instead we should fear for things to get worse if we don't act.

I know Americans love to quote their "founding fathers". We should not only think about what they once said, but also about what they would say now!